


A Tiny Galaxy

by SassyDragon



Category: Warframe
Genre: Gen, OC backstory, Rated M just in case, WAR WITHIN SPOILERS, Zariman 10-0, thanks to Buraidragon and laurelofthestory for the loan of their OCs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 04:05:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19737964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SassyDragon/pseuds/SassyDragon
Summary: And besides, there were people like Mom and Dad to make sure nothing bad actually happened. TheZariman 10-0was the product of literal decades of research. Every possible contingency had been accounted for. The ship could weather anything, except maybe some giant unknown Void catastrophe....Right?





	A Tiny Galaxy

The Dann’kai family was what one might call forgettable. In a world of untold wonders at the highest echelons of society, of gilded rulers and proud warriors and incredible advances in the technology of everything from agriculture to space flight, they represented none of it. Technically, they belonged to the Dax caste, but as far as they knew, no Orokin master had ever visited their backwater region of Sedna. Kural and Azena Dann’kai, despite all their mandatory combat training, lived in peace.

Their daughter Jhia was not particularly memorable either. An ordinary teenager except for her sizable nerdy streak, which often compelled her to talk a mile a minute about whatever fantasy vid or scientific concept she’d discovered now, she got average-to-good grades in school and stayed out of trouble. Kural had used a technicality of his long stay away from active duty to get her out of fight training until she was sixteen, which would not be for another standard year and a half. 

Her parents were Dax, yet they taught her that violence was rarely the right solution. It was well known that none could truly stand against the Orokin, barring perhaps a force of nature on a star-system-level scale. Jhia, at night in her bed when she was having trouble getting to sleep, wondered what might happen if she did have to fight eventually. What enemy would seek them out on Sedna? What natural disaster could cripple the Orokin badly enough that her parents, more army engineers than warriors, would be called in to assist?

As it turned out, their relatively uneventful life was uprooted, not by any catastrophe, but by a terrific opportunity instead. Being out of action for so long had left the Dann’kais with exceptionally clean records; in the summer of Jhia’s fifteenth year, they received a message that contained both a commendation for good service and an order, couched as a request. They had been selected, partially for their law-abiding profiles and partially by luck, to join a mission to the Tau system, on a ship equipped with the very cutting edge of hyperdrive technology. From the moment she heard about it, Jhia was ecstatic. Her school and the majority of her friends were online; even traveling through the Void, as the _Zariman 10-0_ would, she would not lose studying time or contact with them. 

It would take somewhere between eighteen hours and two weeks. The astrocartographers could not be exactly sure, thanks to the Void’s unpredictable nature. Despite the chaos, though, the Dann’kais and all the other passengers were assured that they would be perfectly safe. On the day of departure, she woke up at 0500 hours to take a long shower, put on the clothes she’d chosen carefully the night before, and make sure her entire life was packed into her allotted two suitcases and a backpack. 

The _Zariman_ was enormous, too enormous to land on the ground or waste fuel flying all the way out to Sedna for, at most, ten passengers. They were taken to the ship, suspended in Earth’s orbit, in a much smaller _Perseus_ -class ship instead. The journey from Sedna was oddly tense, especially for Jhia. Every breath seemed taut with anticipation - never mind that she’d never been off Sedna before, soon she would be leaving the Origin System itself, and that was enough to make even the novelty of a first interplanetary flight seem trivial.

Even though she hadn’t been told all that much about the pretenses of the trip, it was obvious to Jhia that this was a military affair first and an exploration mission second. The vast majority of the ship’s population were Dax, including most of the crew, though she did see a few Tsei servants and Hanjo artisans and even a family of Orokin. For such a groundbreaking occasion, one of the first ships to fly to the Tau system and by far the largest to have attempted the journey, there was surprisingly little fanfare. There was plenty of hustle and bustle as everyone boarded and made their way to their quarters, sure, but then they simply...left. No sending-off party, no long formal ceremony like the Orokin always seemed to favor in the holovids, not even a warning about ship safety over the PA. 

Flying through normal space felt no different from being on the ground, except that Jhia’s entire world was now a city-sized ship instead of a city-sized base on a dwarf planet. She made certain she was looking out the huge bay windows on the concourse when the ship reached the appropriate point in the orbit of Saturn and made its transition - its “fold,” as the terminology went - into the Void. The lightshow was everything she’d hoped, something out of big-name vids with millions of credits’ worth of special effects budget. She didn’t sleep for at least three hours after getting in bed that night, reliving the moment over and over, imagining what could await her here or in the Tau system, opening the shutter on her tiny porthole window - they’d been lucky enough to score rooms on the exterior of the ship - and watching the Void outside.

Life more or less settled down after that. Mom and Dad still did their engineering work, making sure the ship’s systems stayed in working order. As usual, Jhia went to school by conference call, learning history and geometry and xenobiology with a class of nineteen other Dax students from Neptune, Pluto, and elsewhere in the Sedna base. Everyone had a little extra spring in their step from the excitement of it all, and a little extra twinkle in their eyes from the Void still flashing its colors out the windows. In short, life was good.

And then, three days in, they started getting turbulence.

Jhia thought little of it for about four hours, until it occurred to her that something really big had to be going on to cause even tiny tremors in the floor of a ship this size. It wasn’t enough to be disruptive on that first day, so she went about her schoolwork as normal until she could go home and ask her parents about it.

“Don’t worry, Jhia,” her mom said. “Engines under a bit more stress than we anticipated. We’ll have it fixed within a couple days.”

A couple days came and went. The occasional tremors in the floor subsided, for a little while, but on the fifth day after Jhia felt the first shock, there was another - larger, deeper, shuddering like the tone of a giant bell too low for her to hear. It was impossible to concentrate on history after that. The moment the class got out, she commed her parents; Mom didn’t pick up, but Dad did, telling her that the cause of the quakes was too scientifically complex to explain in the next thirty seconds but that it amounted to a clogged engine vent. “Clogged with what?!” Jhia demanded. He sighed, gave an answer so full of astrophysics jargon she didn’t understand a word of it, and hung up to get back to work.

That night cycle, she lay awake for an hour again, not with excitement but with a worried concern that bordered on true fear. When she did fall asleep, though, she slept deeply - and she had the first dream.

It was dark. There was no light at all, or else she was blind - Jhia couldn’t see a thing. She blundered around, feeling for anything familiar. If she didn’t know better, she’d think her invisible environs were shifting of their own accord; her fingertips brushed walls that weren’t there a second later, her shins cracked against boxes or other things that she could’ve sworn were thin air. She had no idea where she was, or why.

Then, quite suddenly, she calmed. There was...a polestar, not of light but of something other than light, something beyond light somehow. She could not see it, but she knew where it was, and, with a certainty of dreamer’s logic that would have made no sense to her awake, she knew she should seek it out. 

Just as she turned toward it, though, just as she went to take the first step -

“Jhia - Jhia, wake up, quickly!”

She was back in her bunk on the _Zariman 10-0_ , and her mom was shaking her shoulder hard. “Nnh - Mom…?” she groaned; for a moment she had felt disoriented, surprised to find that the dream was not, in fact, the waking world. It had felt solid. It had felt more real than any other dream she’d ever had. She remembered every second of it, the lightless polestar most of all.

“Come on, get up, don’t bring anything!” her mom nearly shouted at her. “They’re evacuating the entire port side - engine approaching critical, it’s not there yet but they’re trying to keep everyone safe - “

_“Holy shit,”_ Jhia responded, and leapt out of bed. For once her mom didn’t even mention her foul mouth as they ran as fast as they dared out of the family quarters. There were alarms blaring all down the corridor, a PA announcement warning of the evacuation every couple minutes, and outside - did the Void seem...thicker? Brighter? It was like flying through a glowing thundercloud.

“Your dad’s still in the control room,” Mom continued as they ran, “trying to bring everything down to acceptable levels without altering the ship’s course too much or causing any large delay. He’s fine, he’ll be fine. We’ll...we’ll just sleep on the concourse or something.”

Jhia didn’t answer, just kept running toward the starboard side of the ship, away from the endangered engine. She wasn’t tired anymore.

The few hours that she spent on the concourse, milling around with thousands of other people from the port side and trying to find any scrap of news about what might be happening with the engine, were some of the most tense hours of her life. At the end of it, though, a little while after the lights faded brighter for the start of day cycle, there was another announcement: all clear. The engine would be fine. It had been close to overheating, but some quick thinking, a redundant coolant system, and a little luck had saved the day. The evacuation had been a mere precaution to make sure no one was hurt; no one had been, so they could all go back to their temporary homes.

No biology was taught in biology that day. The entire class was spent talking about the averted crisis. Nobody knew the specifics of what had happened - “overheating engine” was an infuriatingly general sort of problem - but they all speculated. Classes were tough later in the day, thanks to the fact that she hadn’t actually gotten that much sleep, but Jhia powered through them. She grilled her dad over dinner that night; apparently there had been something _not quite physical_ stuck in one of the engine vents, however the heck that was supposed to work. Systems had flushed it eventually, but it had already caused some regulator circuit to go on the fritz, and things had snowballed from there. 

It was a little scary to Jhia, how just some regulator circuit blowing could drive half the ship to flee in panic, but that was how space travel worked, she supposed. Especially through the Void. There were so many unknowns. They’d all known the risks before they climbed aboard.

And besides, there were people like Mom and Dad to make sure nothing bad actually happened. The _Zariman 10-0_ was the product of literal decades of engineering, designing and testing and redesigning, and exhaustive Void research. Every possible contingency had been accounted for. The ship could weather anything, except maybe some giant unknown Void monster taking a huge bite out of the hyperdrive.

...Right?

Everyone on the ship was on edge now. The brush with disaster was all anyone could talk about, and to make matters worse, the tremors of turbulence hadn’t stopped. The ship was enormous, easily more than half the size of the entire Sedna colony, but sometimes, when Jhia looked out her tiny quarters window, she was reminded of just how small they all were, hurtling through the infinite Void between stars.

After an evening of particularly bad bumps that felt almost like riding a hoverbus through a mild Sednan ice storm, too bad to get much sleep until midnight or later, Jhia had the second dream. This time, there were no phantom obstacles; it was just her and the polestar, that invisible goal and her own two feet. She started walking, as there was no hurry to run for. The star would wait as long as it took. Though she still could see nothing, her feet were sure and steady, the floor under them smooth. She met no more resistance, nor anything else either. Right before she woke up, she could see gloomy ship’s walls rising around her, out of the impenetrable black.

It was clear, at breakfast that morning, that her parents hadn’t slept at all. Mom and Dad looked like a couple of Old Earth raccoons, or else like someone had given them two black eyes apiece. Dad drank his coffee strong, which he never did, and then they both excused themselves an hour before work would usually start, leaving Jhia to finish her toast alone.

She found she wasn’t hungry anymore. Something must really be wrong. Something big, something _bad,_ or they wouldn’t be working at such a feverish pace.

There was nothing to do in the hour between math and lunch, so, naturally, Jhia’s brain decided to fill itself up with every terrible scenario her limited knowledge of astrophysics and aerospace engineering could conceive of. Something could have gone wrong with the hyperdrive. The Void could be tearing the ship apart. The main computers could be overheating. Some critical life support function, like the recycling of air or wastewater, could be offline. There could be a million tiny hull breaches, too small for humans to notice but enough to set off alarms and vent precious oxygen into space. Every tiny jolt in the floor - they were becoming commonplace - felt like a groundquake, every distant clank or footfall on the floor above like some dread bell heralding untold catastrophe, no matter how much she tried to tell herself everything was fine. 

Eventually, she gave up. Everything was not fine. Her nerves were ready to snap. After a small lunch she didn’t really taste, she went toward the center of the ship and the control rooms under the bridge, where her parents monitored all the _Zariman_ ’s myriad systems. Kids weren’t allowed in the control rooms, but she’d known her dad’s access code for months, and if she acted like she belonged there… Jhia slipped inside, forcing herself to keep moving, without stopping to gawk at all the behemoths of readouts and exposed wire. 

She vaguely remembered that her mom’s station was on the second floor, but everybody seemed to be everywhere right now - jogging scientists nearly ran into her twice. It looked like an enormous dance of logistics and constant pressure, like the engineers were defenders of a besieged castle, trying desperately to keep some phantom attacker out on every front. Mom wouldn’t be at her station; she’d be wherever she was needed most, which could be five rooms away.

Jhia went to leave, but found an empty coffee mug thrust into her hands by a man with deep dark circles under his eyes. “Can you - refill this please, full caf no milk one sugar, sorry but Dr. Henelas needed this inertia recalc done two hours ago -”

She nodded, and dashed off with the mug without another word. At least the coffee machine would stay in one place.

All afternoon, even when she was supposed to be in history class, she ran coffee, tea, and messages between her parents’ coworkers. It was hard to tell whether they were making any headway, or even what they were doing - there was always another shield to recalibrate, another tenth of a percent of energy to redistribute, another oxygen requisition to submit (the stuff was rationed, for good reason). As afternoon wore into evening, though, things settled down slightly. Settled down, except that there were more and more damage reports needing to be filed with this or that Dax officer. Blown fuses. Overloaded conduits. Irreparably damaged atomizers and circuits and filter grates. 

“This ship’s coming apart at the seams,” Mom nearly cried to her. “I don’t - I have to stay. We need to keep her together, keep her flying, however the hell we can.”

In the end, some two or three hours after the lights dimmed for night cycle, Dad decided he could risk going back to quarters and getting a little sleep. “They can spare me for a few hours,” he said grimly to her, though he still kept busy with a datapad the whole way back. Jhia hadn’t realized how exhausted she was until her head hit the pillow and she was out like a light.

She didn’t remember her dreams this time, but they were fractured and logicless, flitting between topics with no heed for Jhia or her desires; she felt caught in one of Earth’s great whitewater rapids, dragged along with the current. The all-ship alarm succeeded in waking her this time, for a reason she never knew. Two bunks below her, Dad whispered “oh gods…” into the dark.

They laid there in silent terror for a minute. Jhia couldn’t tell what Dad was thinking, but for her, it was like all those infinite clouds of Void were pressing in on the ship, crushing it until the ceiling above her head felt like so much ferrite eggshell, ready at any moment to shatter and fling her out into space. She counted forty-six seconds with the ceiling intact before Dad got up, checked his datapad, and said, like a doctor delivering the news of his patient’s terminal disease, “They’ve lost part of the hyperdrive’s cooling cycle.”

Jhia didn’t know what that meant. Was it bad? It was probably bad. She was tired, she was scared, she was fourteen and knew no astrophysics. She didn’t know.

“The cycle’s due in…eleven minutes,” he said. “If they’ve gotten it back, if they’ve fixed the conduit… We - won’t know until then.”

Eleven minutes was too little time to make it all the way to the control rooms. There was nothing Dad or Jhia could do.

They didn’t turn on the lights. They just sat on Dad’s bunk, the lowest one, hugging each other tight while the alarm rang its call to escape. Eventually Dad murmured that his leg was falling asleep and she’d better get off his lap, she was too big to be doing this anymore. Jhia didn’t want to, didn’t want to be away from him when eleven minutes came, but she let him stand up anyway. He walked across the room and opened the shutter on the tiny porthole window. The Void outside was thick with multicolored light, angry and radiant.

She was a fool. She was so stupid, she hadn’t set a timer, and the shock took her by surprise. Jhia, pacing, nearly fell over as the ground suddenly lurched, with a massive noise like distant thunder. Dad staggered against the wall, his face gone suddenly pale. “That’s - it’s gone, the - there may be a shockwave -”

Another quake shuddered through the ship. She heard creaking metal, thunder all around her, someone screaming. And then the shaking stopped, but there was more noise of people running and shouting and someone crying next door. Dad ran into the hallway. Jhia couldn’t breathe for one strange hazy moment - her hands and feet felt cold, numb, she’d never been this afraid before in her life and she guessed she was just reacting physically but dammit, what else was she supposed to do but stand there and wait for...well, whatever cataclysm had to be coming, if there had really been some sort of overheat and they’d lost the hyperdrive?

Dad suddenly reappeared in the doorway. He looked strange, backlit in shifting colors that couldn’t belong to just the lights outside. “Jhia!” he gasped. “Duck and c--”

The shockwave phased through the wall, a solid mass of noise and light and something other than light, something beyond light. It was that something _other_ that seemed to slice straight through her, though it was not so kind to Dad - it knocked him off his feet with the force of a speeding hovercraft, slamming him headlong into the wall. Jhia didn’t hear his groan of pain. She had already sunk to her knees and passed clean out, victim of what she could only describe later as some massive cosmic overload.

It wasn’t normal unconsciousness, if unconsciousness had a “normal”; it was more like she had been plunged forcibly into sleep, since she had the third dream.

The walls of the ship from last time had materialized fully around her now. It was a corridor much like all the rest on the _Zariman,_ though it was one she didn’t recognize. That same invisible polestar lay somewhere far forward, except that now she recognized its not-light: her sudden sleep had been accompanied, or perhaps caused, by a blinding not-flash of it. Whatever the not-quite-light was, it came from the Void.

Jhia walked on anyway, and kept walking, her footsteps just as sure and steady. She walked and watched as wisps of energy like miniature nebulas scudded around her feet, rising and thickening into glowing mist. She walked through it, watching as she walked further and the walls dissolved, the floor underneath her turning to starlight.

It was peaceful, there in the endless mist like so many rainbows fallen to the ground. The polestar goal seemed closer. Jhia could have stayed there forever, but eventually she woke, feeling a bruise on her forehead from where it had hit the ground. The lights were on, but Dad wasn’t there. She found him in the main room, looking out the slightly larger window. His face was still pale.

“...Dad?” Jhia ventured, a bit hoarse. How long had she been out?

He startled badly at her voice. “Oh, gods, Jhia… Sorry, sweetie, I’m just - everything’s too quiet. It’s too quiet. I feel like - I feel like there’s something out there. Watching us. I feel - watched.”

“Out in the Void?”

“Yeah.”

Jhia didn’t know what to say. Whatever paranoia he was evidently suffering from, she felt none of it. It didn’t seem too quiet to her - in fact, the soft noise of activity was everywhere, people moving and talking in urgent raised voices. She was scared for other reasons, namely that she herself felt too okay. She’d been totally knocked out by some unknown force, created by the catastrophic failure of the _Zariman_ ’s hyperdrive, and all she had to show for it was a little bump on her head. No impaired thought, no hint of anything indicating a concussion, nothing physically wrong or even unusual.

“Do you know if Mom’s okay?”

Dad just stared at her, as if he hadn’t even thought to wonder. 

This was starting to creep her out. Jhia went back into the bedroom with some mumbled excuse and tried to comm her mom, but there was no answer. Deciding that any action at all was better than sitting around here waiting for rescue or death, Jhia changed out of her pajamas and back into her daytime uniform, then struck out for the control rooms, just above and forward of the main hyperdrive housing. She could hardly bear to imagine what might have happened to Mom, so close to the epicenter of the blast.

The corridors got emptier the closer she went. Most of it could be chalked up to the fact that most of the personal quarters, where people would have been sleeping, were toward the outside of the ship, but she ran past whole rows of usually occupied rooms - greenhouses, rec rooms, comm hubs - that now stood quiet and vacant in the gloom of night cycle. Everything pulsed with red from the alarm lights. 

She was about to try and punch Dad’s code into the control room door when she heard someone gasp behind her. She whirled around, but it was only a boy a year or two younger than her. “Don’t go in there!” he shouted.

“My mom’s in there,” Jhia argued back. “Why shouldn’t I?”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m just - scared. My parents are acting weird and I don’t know what happened to the ship…”

“Hyperdrive blew. Some coolant cycle whatsit - I don’t know specifics. Everybody’s probably freaking out but my dad was acting...paranoid or something, too?”

“So was mine. Mom said everything would be alright but she lied. I know she did. Tasie said - Tasie said the same thing. Maybe it’s _everyone,_ then you’d be stuck in there with so many machines and so many people - I can’t even imagine trying to fight, if something happened. If people didn’t just lie, or see things - if it was _worse._ ”

Despite her own fear, Jhia fought the urge to roll her eyes. Of course the typical Dax response to a scary situation would be wondering how to fight it off. “I’ll be fine. I just need to make sure my mom’s okay, then I’ll come right back out. Head aft where it’s safer if you want, just don’t wait up.” Before she could talk herself out of it, she punched in the code and slipped through the door.

It slid shut behind her with a whisper. Back at quarters it had not been _too quiet,_ but now? The sheer contrast between the frenetic activity of...how long was it ago?...and this dead air shook Jhia’s resolve. If Dad had been here when he said he thought something was watching, she’d have believed him. 

Nobody seemed to be there. Nothing moved, save a few blinking readouts and a torn wire spitting sparks above her head. She couldn’t tell who or what had damaged it. Just like outside, it was dark except for the red emergency lighting, throbbing brighter and dimmer like the ship’s own colossal heartbeat - slow, irregular, nearly gone. Jhia found she didn’t dare call out for Mom, so she just moved forward into the space once crowded with scientists, now full only of red shadows and silence.  
She did start to hear movement as she went along, but it was as quiet as her own footsteps, as though someone were trying to hide from her. There was still no one visible. This was getting creepier by the second. She found herself wishing she’d given more credence to that boy’s suggestion, that she stay out for her own safety, but no, she had to find Mom. She’d find Mom, she’d tell Mom that she and Dad were fine in case Mom hadn’t gotten her frantic comm messages, and then she would book it out of here as fast as she could, hopefully with Mom in tow. That was it. That was all she had to do, then she could be back where there was slightly less chance of dying.

A sudden scream erupted somewhere to her right. Jhia screamed too, reflexively, jumping backward away from it; her back hit the side of a computer bank; she slid down it into a terrified crouch, her breathing suddenly sounding far too loud, whatever that was that had made someone scream would hear her for sure and then…

Nothing happened. 

Nothing, for what felt like an hour but was probably more like five minutes, nothing but the red light and the silence. Jhia thought she heard footsteps, several pairs at once, but she couldn’t be sure. Nothing jumped at her, no Void beast came creeping around the corner. Nothing.

She uncurled herself, once she dared to move, and cautiously stood up. Still nothing. Thanking her lucky stars that all the equipment damped any echoes she might have made, she continued onward, still painfully alert for anything out of place. Twice she froze when she heard more movement close by, but she still saw nothing.

In hindsight, she should have realized. If you’re prey and you know there’s a hunter, if you can’t find it, it’s probably trying - and succeeding - not to be found.

A lone figure loomed out of the dark, one Jhia recognized. She only barely kept herself from sobbing in relief. Mom was here, she’d found her, of all the people who must have been here but weren’t anymore or were hiding or hurt or dead or something, 

Mom was here and she looked fine - ! Jhia ran to her mother, intending to give her just about the biggest hug possible, but she grabbed Jhia’s wrist before she could.

“There’s been an accident,” Mom said, her voice strange. Distant. “But don’t worry, angel. You’re safe with me. Mama’s here. Everything will be okay.”

Her eyes were wrong.

“Mom,” Jhia started. “Mom, I know. I know there’s been an accident. Something’s not right, please - please let go…”

She didn’t. Her eyes were wrong, something was wrong, something was _wrong_ and it shook Jhia to her core. She tried to jerk her arm out of her mother’s grip, but the hold only tightened. 

“Don’t worry,” Mom repeated, still distant, eyes wrong, _smile_ wrong, what was going on, “don’t run, child, you’re safe...safe…”

Jhia heard movement from behind her. She whirled to see three others - she recognized them all but knew none by name, they were three of the other scientists - crouched like predators, eyes dark. One had a Dax boot dagger.

With her free hand, Mom made a grab for Jhia’s throat. Jhia didn’t think, just screamed, tried to get free, to force Mom away from her any way she could—

And then the world shattered.


End file.
